By Greg Vogt:
They always tell you that making a good first impression means everything, but if there is one thing I have learned since moving to Boston, it’s that first impressions often mean nothing. I’ll be the first to admit that I have made many wrong assumptions about the majority of people I have met. But of all the people I’ve misjudged through the years, Louie is the one who really taught me this lesson.

By Kelsey Worley:
It was a gloomy, quiet morning in Harvard Square, and as I waited for Felix’s Shoe Repair to open, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching me. I looked around, searching for a pair of eyes that might meet mine, but found nothing. I laughed at myself as I sat down on a hard stone bench and thought, “You’ve got to stop doing this.” I had hoped that by my second semester I’d be less afraid of the city.

By Scott Nanos:
It's three fifteen in the afternoon when I arrive at the photographer's studio. The entire apartment is one large room. All four walls consist only of brick and black cavities where brick once existed. A lonesome, feeble wood column reluctantly holds up the entire ceiling. It moans in agony as I pace the room, threatening a collapse. The door latch clicks shut with an irreversible finality. I'm trapped.

By Greg Hatem:
I was walking down Inman Street in Cambridge the other day, from Inman Sq. to Central. As I approached Massachusetts Ave., I noticed an older woman sitting on the porch of a random elegant old home. She was looking rather haggard, as if she was down on her luck. She confirmed this by asking me for exactly 70 cents, perhaps to supplement a bus fare. I was drawn in by the specificity of her request as well as her seemingly good-natured intentions. I searched my pocket for the 70 cents, but I came up a bit short. "Oh, honey, I'll take whatever you got," she reassured me. She stared me down for a second, as if she was reading me. I started to walk away when the most amazing words came out of her mouth.

By David Kuchera:
Taking a moment to breathe in the freshly acrid aroma of cleaning solution, which is overpowered only
Airport by Alessio Romano
by dozens of double grande half-calf soy mocha lattes, I step into Boston's infamous two-dollar amusement park. Having brought with me no second-hand newspaper, no iPod, and not a single copy of whatever most people are reading in Freshman English this semester, I feel a bit out-of-place. I find a slightly sticky seat amongst the suits, the studious, and the overwhelmingly sleepy commuters to endure a jerky journey through the city in the belly of this steel beast.

By Attilio Foresta-Martin:
Every institution with a very strong identity is based on a precise and defined ideology and on an even more precise system of rules. If you want to see with your own eyes the distorted reality of an institution with a narrow ideology you have to devote at least two hours of your time at Starbucks.